More than pleasant (Pleasantville (DVD))

Member Name: Barold

Product:	Pleasantville (DVD)
Date:	22/05/09 (12 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A pleasure to watch

Disadvantages: none

Toby Maguire and Reese Witherspoon star here as teenage siblings David and Jennifer in 90s America. She is cool, he really isn't. On an evening when Witherspoon finally gets a date with her dream guy there is also a marathon showing of Pleasantville, a black and white soap/sit-com about an idyllic small town somewhere in the American Midwest. In this place the weather is always perfect, nothing untoward happens and the basketball team always win.
During a fight over who will watch what that evening the TV remote is broken, but fortunately there is a TV repair man just passing by who assists them by providing a new remote. Suspicious? Of course not!
This new remote sucks the siblings into Pleasantville. Suddenly the 2 modern day Americans find themselves in a lovely town in the 50's. In black and white. In fact they've replaced the children of the main family in the show. Now 'Bud' and 'Mary-Sue' are stuck here, and have to try to work out how to return to normality without disrupting the show too much. A very impressive support cast bring the rest of the show to life - Joan Allen and William H Macy as the parents, J T Walsh as Mayor, and Jeff Daniels running the dinner Bud works at in the evening. Our 2 leads discover that the world they are in really is a TV show - the toilets contain no toilets, the books in the library are blank and the road out of town leads into town.
This is the basic plot, and might have been interesting enough in itself without the extra details thrown in. Although our heroes try not to, they accidentally change things, and as they do the things and people changed gradually transform from being black and white into colour.
At this point the film's message becomes clear. It's a film about race relations. The difference and conflict between the normal black and white people and the coloured people is the major drive of the film, along with the question for the leads of whether they are changing things for better or worse. Although the town loses some of its perfection, as it rains for the 1st time ever, and the basketball team lose a game, it also gains much in variety, originality and expression.
As the name suggests this is a very pleasant film. Although it is by no means the most exciting or hilarious film it moves at a nice pace and after repeated viewings there are no parts that I feel like skipping through. The humour throughout is gentle so while I don't often laugh out loud at it I find myself smiling for the duration. In terms of the cast I like the support characters more than the leads - it's the natives of the town who have the greatest changes to adjust to. Overall a very nice film that I come back to time and again.

Summary: A delightful film, watch it whenever you want to relax